A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose
acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other
acronyms/abbreviations. The original of the breed may have been TINT
(“TINT Is Not TECO”). The classic examples were two MIT
editors called EINE (“EINE Is Not EMACS”) and ZWEI
(“ZWEI Was EINE Initially”). More recently, there is a Scheme
compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and
GNU (q.v., sense 1) stands for “GNU's Not
Unix!” — and a company with the name Cygnus, which expands to
“Cygnus, Your GNU Support” (though Cygnus people say this is a
backronym). The GNU recursive acronym may have been
patterned on XINU, “XINU Is Not Unix” — a particularly
nice example because it is a mirror image, a backronym, and a recursive
acronym. See also mung,
EMACS.